South African fossils could be 'new human ancestor'

[HappySqurriel]

Samus Aran said:

highwaystar101 said:

HappySqurriel said:

A few years back, after a hunter was charged with shooting a polar bear/grizzly bear cross when he only had a grizzly bear hunting licence I started to think that humanoids may not have had an ancestor (or missing link) species in the way that people imagine it. Basically, imagine Africa as a continent being full of pre-human apes that have adapted to their environment as best as they could, and then (for some reason) these species start heavily inter-breeding; being that the mortality rate would be very high for a variety of reasons, the random mixing of traits would result in offspring that were both dramatically more successful and unusually unsuccessful. Within a very short period of time (a couple hundred years) all of the distinctive species could be virtually eliminated in favour of one dominant species.

 

So essentially you believe that rapid evolution occurred? I can see your point when you look at animals like dogs or horses, who rapidly evolved in a matter of a few thousand years when put under new, more extreme, circumstances. Inter-breeding with high mortality rates and high mutation rates would possibly cause rapid evolution.

However, I would personally refute that and say that human evolution occurred over millions of years, but that recent evolution has occurred at an exponential rate due to changing environments such as civilisation and migration.

Dogs were domesticated by humans, that's why they changed so dramatically fast. Same goes for other animals and crops. 

 

That’s kind of my point ...

You could probably look at evolution as being a phenomena which can cause a species to split into multiple "Sub-Species" which can (potentially) on their own evolve until a superior species emerges that replaces them, and it can also cause multiple "Sub-Species" to converge where the new cross-breed can (potentially) replace the original species. A large portion of discussion on evolution tends to focus on diversion, where conversion is also entirely possible.

Up until recently humans didn’t (really) have the possibility to introduce new traits to a species (and we’re still very limited in our ability to do this) so we picked traits from different individuals and groups of a larger species and combined them into a species which was of use to us. Humans could have undergone a similar process of consolidation of traits, but rather than it being caused by another species it could have simply been because diverse groups of pre-human apes had a variety of different mutations that made them each better suited to life on the ground; and because of this they were fruitful, multiplied, and (through population growth and migration) had greater interaction with other (similar) groups. With the change to life on the ground acting as a evolutionary force, it is likely that these variations that improved life on the ground would rapidly emerge as dominant traits in the new cross-breed population.